I encounter problems trying to use System Restore to restore the computer to a previous state. While a restoration process is supposed to take only a few minutes, System Restore's progress stops after 30% ,or so, and remains in this status for a long time (an hour).
I've pressed Ctrl+Alt+Del to check if the program wasn't responding, but it seemed to be working fine.
In such situations, I terminate System Restore from Program Manager and restart the computer so that the restoration is reported as failed and no changes are been made to the system.

I searched Microsoft's Knowledge Base for symptoms similar to the ones I'm having, but found nothing.

Could anyone, please, provide me with a solution to this, any workarounds you've tried or any possible diagnosis to the problem.

Thanks in advance

julo, restore balks at ANY kind of alteration to disk (similar to defrag). A screensaver is quite often the culprit. Be sure you don't have anything running in the background that uses disk access.
HTH.
Ed in Texas.

Ed in Texas..thanks for the advice
but I used to restore my system successfully even when I'm running programs like PCHealth and McAfee anti-virus in the background.
I only encountered this behavior recently and for unknown reasons.
And by the way, my screen saver is disabled all the time.

Can I assume in such situation that some restore points, and hence all subsequent points, are corrupted?
Can an uninstallation of some app cause such thing?

it's been awhile since i did a system restore with me so i don't recall if it can be run from safe mode or not, but you might give it a try.

What is the difference between running System Restore in Safe Mode and running it in Normal Mode?

Don't know if you have the option or not , you could turn off restore , reboot which wipes all previous points and then turn it back on and reboot and create a new restore point . this may not be valid if you are trying to repair something that isn't working currently , otherwise not sure what would cause that unless it is trying to restore data into a bad sector on the harddrive . Might want to try scandisk before doing a restore .

julo... I'm reading this because MY "System-Restore" won't work, either! Some info. for you: WINDOWS MEDIA PLAYER#9... apparently can interfere w/ System Restore. I know this because I read a Windows message on my comp. stating this! And, I downloaded the PROPER player (diff.-ones for "XP" & "ME".) Still, mine won't work! This could be YOUR problem, & you might want to investigate this. Good-luck DAVE

David R. Kreiser

Thank you, vipergg
this bad sector thing didn't occur to me.
I'll try scanning the hd then restoring, because I don't want to disable and re-enable System Restore and lose all my previous restore points.

In reply to the message by David R. Kreiser,
I don't think I have Windows Media Player 9, because you get version 9 from an update ( I guess) and I haven't updated this program. I use the version that came originally with Windows( v.7)
But thanks a lot for the information.

I'll try ScanDisk and I'll tell you how things go with me.

I scanned the disk for errors, but there weren't any.
Then I stopped all programs running in the background and ran System Restore, but...
it didn't work.

What did work actually was re-setting the Data Store, where System Restore keeps all its restore points and logs, by disabling and re-enabling System Restore.

I restored the system successfully after that, but still don't know what the problem really was; and I don't think that I'll be able to prevent this problem from happenning in the future..
frustrating, isn't it?